A response to Paterson's "The Empty Image"

Don Paterson's "The Empty Image: a new model of the poetic trope", available
from his Ars Poetica
page has more in it than I can comment upon or understand, but I'll mention a few
points.

I don't think he's saying much that's new, but he doesn't claim to. I
think he's saying that word-meanings create provisional context which
in turn modifies word-meanings (and modifies reading strategy). The modification might be more than just a
tweak: ground might become tenor, details might become symbolic, and v.v..
These feedback loops operate on several features, not just along the part-whole
axis but
also along transparent-opaque, sound-layout etc. Readers are likely to
recontextualize as they read, delaying the processing of the raw material
until the appropriate methods of processing become clearer.

"discredited lines of philosophical thought ... persist in the literary
sphere long past their sell-by-date" - I've noticed that too.

"shouldn't talk about what the poem or an image means, so much as what
meaning it generates" - I think that's the only way to do it. Within a
certain group/context (e.g. of mainstream UK poets) there may be so much
agreement about a poem's meaning and quality that one might, as a
short-hand, say that the poem contains meaning, but give the text to a US
avant-gardist and you'll get a surprise.

He says "My definition of overinterpretation is the avowal of the presence
of effects ... discovered in your post-reading critical vivisection. I
think these are to be strongly distrusted" but later says "We find
ourselves attuned only to a small part of the electromagnetic spectrum, and
whatever universe our senses conjure up for us is not the universe" - I
re-read to compensate for my narrow tuning using telescopes, microscopes,
(and Google, syllable-counting) etc, otherwise I'd miss too much. I need to
re-read to catch up with some of my peers who don't have the blindspots that
I have. Where
does re-reading end and overinterpretation begin?

"Poets coin new metaphors that either reveal underlying mappings in
existing conceptual metaphors, or - more often - they innovate new
conceptual mappings" - I like this part of his essay, and the consequences.

"That dynamic is bidirectional; take 'the moon is a dinner plate'" - by
chance a Judy
Brown poem has "a thick white saucer like a worn-out moon, brittle from too
much shining"!

2 related little stubs I've produced are

Attention and Poetic Effect - "Two issues relating to
Attention are 1) what is being focussed on, and 2) the narrowness and
intensity of the focus. Here I attempt to describe the effects of some
poetic features. The up/down directions mentioned below pertain to the
hierarchy formed by letters, words/sound, localized meaning, and general
meaning. The in/out direction is relative to the text...."

Poetic Requirements - "To increase the
poetic effect of a text, you can make the text more poetic, or you can make
the reader adopt a more poetic approach. ... But of course there's more to
it than having a text and a reader - the 2 need to get together under
suitable conditions. In Acumen 54 (Jan 2006) Judy Gahagan wrote 'the once
unique poetry habitat is a threatened one', a metaphor which can be
extended. When a species' habitat shrinks, a few things are likely to
happen ..."